The life you lead depends a great deal on the choices you make every day. This chapter will demonstrate how different choices bring about different results. Have fun!
Instructions: Do not read these stories straight through! You will be asked to make choices as you read, and your selections will determine the outcome. After you make your choice, follow the directions and see what happens next!
The lucky lottery
You and your friend are walking together when you come upon a store selling lottery tickets. They cost $2 each, and the grand prize is one million dollars! You have $3, so you decide to buy one. Your friend also wants to buy a ticket but has only $1.
What do you do? If you buy your ticket and keep your other dollar so that you will have some money left, go to (4). If you tell your friend you will give him your extra dollar so that he can purchase a ticket also, go to (2).
The freedom fighter
You are the graduate of a good university. You have a doctorate in religion. You have a beautiful, supportive, and intelligent wife. There is a lot of injustice in your society, especially toward people of color, such as you and your wife are. However, with your education and in the right setting, preferably the North, you can probably make a comfortable life for your family on the upper levels of African American society.
You are asked to pastor a church in the South, where there is much more prejudice against black people. You know that you and your wife will experience more racial indignities there, yet you feel called to go there.
What do you do? If you tell your wife you feel called to go to the Southern church, go to (7). If you keep quiet about feeling called to go South and worry about what your colleagues will think of you, returning to such a racially backward way of life, go to (1). If you decide to go to the Southern church and, with your wife's support, challenge the racially prejudiced atmosphere in the South go to (11).
The party
You are a 16-year-old boy. It is summer and your parents and younger sister are going out of town to stay with some friends for a week. You beg your parents to allow you to stay home and watch the apartment. At first they refuse. But after discovering that the two neighbors are also going away and will be unable to care for the family dog and water the plants, your parents agree to let you stay home alone under two conditions. First, you absolutely cannot have anyone over except for your best friend Mike, whom your parents trust. Second, you must be home by ten each evening (and you know your father will call almost every night to make sure you’re all right).
You are happy that your parents trust you, and you want to prove to them that you are mature. Your mother keeps her home as clean as a museum. Your parents do not smoke and hate the smell of cigarettes. They rarely drink, although your father keeps a liquor cabinet for the sake of guests.
A day after your family’s departure, Mike tries to talk you into having a "small" party. All your friends know that your parents are away and that you have the whole apartment to yourself. You are a little angry at Mike for telling people after he promised he wouldn’t. He just laughs and says you’ll have a heart attack by the time you’re 25 if you don’t stop taking everything so seriously.
For the first few days you ignore their requests for a party, but people keep calling you about it. You realize that if you don’t invite at least some friends over, they will cut you out of their social group and call you a goody-goody.
What do you do? If you decide to have the party under the condition that only five people will come, and that there will be no drinking or smoking, go to (8). If you decide not to have the party at all, go to (15).
Choices and results
(1) You lead a good, black, middle class life, but your heart sometimes tells you that the people in the South really needed your help. You always wonder what might have been had you taken the sacrificial route to be among your people down there. In fact, race relations in America seem to be getting worse and worse, even here in the North where you live. Eventually, racial war breaks out. The End.
(2) Later you find that your ticket is a loser, but your friend's ticket wins the million dollars! When you see him again he says to you, "If you have change for $10, I'll pay back the dollar you gave me last week."
What do you do? If you shout insults at him and walk away angrily, go to (16). If, in expressing your anger at his ingratitude, you hit him, go to (6). If you congratulate your friend on his good fortune, sincerely tell him, "The dollar was a gift. Keep it," and give him a friendly pat on the back, go to (10).
(3) As you try to engage blacks in peaceful resistance to white prejudice, your family is threatened.
What do you do? If you give up, go to (5). If you continue despite the persecution, go to (12).
(4) Your ticket loses. Your friend is upset by your stinginess in not lending him a dollar so that he could buy a ticket as well. In the months ahead the two of you grow steadily apart. Years later you pass each other on the street without even recognizing each other. The End.
(5) You and your fellow blacks spend a lot of time decrying your situation to one another. You become more and more unhappy. It is painful to watch your wife and beautiful children affected by racism. However, you accept that this is just the way it is in the United States. No one really believes in the Declaration of Independence or that all people should be free and equal. You watch sadly as America declines and the American dream becomes a nightmare. The End.
(6) Your friend falls from the blow and strikes his head on a stone. He dies. You are sent to prison. When you are released from prison, your old friends shun you as a murderer. You wander about from place to place, always feeling marked as a killer. The End.
(7) Your wife says she loves and trusts you and that if you want to pastor the Southern church, she will support you. Go to (14).
(8) Nine o’clock comes and the doorbell rings. You open the door and to your surprise and dismay, ten friends, including a girl from school whom you really like, are at the door. They have alcohol with them.
What do you do? If you let them in, go to (13). If you tell them that they cannot come in because there are too many of them and you had already said that no drinking would be allowed, go to (15).
(9) Because of the rejection you experience, you become a recluse. Your marriage and finances deteriorate. You end up living all alone, blaming white people for all your personal problems. The End.
(10) Your friend is moved by your generous gesture. In tears, he tells you, "Half the prize money is yours. Please forgive me for being so stingy." You say that he does not owe you anything but his friendship. Your friend insists on sharing the winnings with you. The two of you go into business together and become wealthy. Your greatest wealth, however, is your undying friendship. As time passes, you continue to share your lives together and live happily and productively. The End.
(11) As you challenge white racism, people laugh at you, arrest you, and put you in jail; the FBI is after you, and people you respect think maybe you have carried things too far.
What do you do? If you continue to speak out against injustice, go to (12). If you stop trying to share your message with these ungrateful people, go to (9).
(12) Persecution continues, but you steadily gain support. As you lead people in boycotting and protesting injustice, you are asked to speak to wider and wider audiences. Your face appears on the cover of Time magazine. White people are joining you now. The nation is listening to you. The President of the United States talks to you on the phone and asks your advice. Laws are passed that support black people's rights to vote, to go to good schools, and to use any facility used by whites. People's attitudes are changing. America's conscience awakens. The National Guard is sent to protect you and your followers when you march. Blacks enter politics, entertainment, movies, housing, and jobs because of your work. Whites repent for their unfair treatment of blacks. Black people have new pride, new hope, and new opportunities thanks to you. You win the Nobel Peace Prize and generations afterward thank you for your contributions to humanity. You are Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The End.
(13) At first you run from room to room, picking up empty beer bottles and cigarette butts, nagging your friends to keep the music down. After about an hour you tire of being a watchdog and decide to join the fun. A few of your friends (including that pretty girl) are playing a drinking game in the kitchen. Mike asks you to join in, and you do. After you have six or seven beers and a few cigarettes, you get up the courage up to ask a girl to dance. It turns out she wants to do a lot more than dance. You know you really don't want to go into the bedroom with this girl. You don’t know anything about her but her name. But you’re really drunk by now and your friends keep urging you on. You wake up the next afternoon alone in the apartment. Looking around, you can’t believe it’s your apartment! There are beer cans, bottles, and cigarette butts all over. Fortunately, you find nothing broken and manage to clean everything up before your parents return home, so they never know. All of your friends are happy and think you’re "really cool" to have had such a great party. You think it's all over until, two months later, the girl you were with tells you she is pregnant and you are the father. The End.
(14) The South is unbelievably hard to deal with. There are unfair laws everywhere that restrict black people from eating in restaurants with whites, using the same drinking fountains as whites, sitting in the front of the bus with whites, and using the same pools and facilities as whites. You feel angry about this. Your father was a fighter against white racism, and you have never forgotten the indignities he and you have undergone as black people in a white-dominated society.
What do you do? If you decide you will fight racism in any way you honorably can, go to (11). If you decide to commiserate with fellow blacks about the situation but stay tight in your own communities and not challenge the white power structure, go to (5).
(15) Your friend Mike is disgusted with you, and your other friends don't want to talk to you anymore. You feel bad, but you know you did the right thing. You couldn’t betray your parents trust. You didn’t believe that your friends could have a small get-together without drinking and smoking. You’re lonely for a while, but then you start to think about the way your former friends treated you and the way they treat each other. Besides, who knows what could have happened if you had let them have a party in your home? You make better friends. The End.
(16) Your former friend uses his money well and becomes wealthy. You are full of resentment as you hear of his success. Meanwhile, your life is lonely and bitter as you continue to curse your former friend. The End.
Lesson Plan Objectives
Cognitive: Students will understand that choices have consequences. Students will gain tools to make more responsible choices and decisions.
Affective: Students will want to make the choices that lead to the best outcomes in the stories and in their lives.
Behavioral: Students will apply four criteria in hypothetical situations to make good choices. Students will describe dilemmas in their own lives in which they had to make a decision. Students will compare their decision in the past with one they would make in the present, using the four criteria.
Class Session 1
Explain to the class that, as the chapter points out in the first paragraph, life is full of choices. The choices we make bring about different consequences or results. The students will be reading short stories in groups and following the different results of the various choices offered.
Mention that there are three stories: the lucky lottery, the freedom fighter, and the party. Assign five students to the lucky lottery story, nine students to the freedom fighter story, and four students to the party story. Have them sit in groups according to the story they are doing. They all need to have their student books with them. If there are extra students, allow them to sit with the group that is doing the story that most interests them.
Have the students begin the story together as a group. Whenever a choice comes up, students mark in their books (lightly, in pencil) the choice they would make. Then students who agree on a choice break into a smaller group to follow up on their choices. If they are offered more choices, they break into yet smaller groups to follow up on their choices, which they mark lightly in their student books. (The “freedom fighter” story is the most complex.) When they are finished, have them share with one another the thread of what happened according to their choices, reading aloud to one another their circled choices in order. This is so the groups can see the effect different choices have on the outcome of a person’s life.
Do this again several times until each student has heard each story and learned of all the different possible outcomes for each one.
Ask the students for reactions to this. Hopefully, they will be amused and also find it thought-provoking. Emphasize that life offers many choices and that some choices are life-changing; others less so. Some choices can be taken back and corrected; others cannot. Ask them if they think it is good to make wise choices in life.
Questions for reflection
1. In the story “The party,” besides the choices given, how else could the sixteen-year-old boy have handled the situation?
2. In one ending of the story (#13), the girl becomes pregnant. Do you think the boy would have acted differently if he had taken this possibility seriously and considered the effect on the girl’s life?
3. If Mike had thought about his best friend’s situation rather than what he wanted to do, would it have changed his behavior?
4. In which ending did the boy consider the feelings of others? In which did he not?
5. Why is it that we often allow decisions to happen to us rather than taking a more aggressive role in determining our choice?
6. Why do we often find it so difficult to foresee the results of our decisions?
7. What does it mean to say that hindsight is “20-20” (in other words, 100% perfect vision in an eye exam)?
8. What does it mean to “rationalize” your actions?
9. What can we do to better foresee the impact our decisions and actions may have on ourselves and others?
10. In each of the stories, what are the moral and ethical issues involved?
Class Session 2
Remind students of the last class session and the different directions their choices in the stories led to. An interesting poem about choices is “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. Perhaps you could read this poem aloud to the students or write it on the blackboard, possibly before class so it is there for them to read when they come in.
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
This poem likens life’s choices to a path in a wood. Ask the students if their experience with the stories leads them to understand why Frost says, “knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.”
Point out that the poet says he took a long time to look at the paths and choose, trying to see ahead to where they might lead. It is good to weigh up the possible results and consequences of our choices and decisions. The poet’s thoughtfulness—”long I stood”—probably helped him make the best choice. On what basis did Frost seem to make his decision?
Ask students why Frost says he will be telling about this “with a sigh.” Explain that a sigh may mean regret over the choice made (it turned out to be the wrong one), or it may mean simply that we cannot have something—whenever we make a choice, other choices must be sacrificed. This can be as inconsequential as deciding to go the long way around to the shop rather than taking the short way, in order to get more fresh air—or it may be as consequential as deciding whom to marry. When we make a choice, other choices must be sacrificed—choices that may have strong good points we wish we could also have but cannot, if we are going to have the superior good points the other choice offers. That is another reason why it is important to make good choices—so that we have fewer regrets.
Exercise: “Moral decision-making steps”
Applying the following four steps in deciding how you would act in each of the three dilemmas A, B and C:
1. Determine what the dilemma is.
2. Decide what moral and ethical issues are involved (e.g., honesty, respect, responsibility, tolerance).
3. Think about how your actions will affect other people, either directly or indirectly.
4. Make your decision.
A. You are taking the final exam in science class. You notice that your best friend is cheating, but no one else notices. Do you say anything to your teacher?
B. Your mom asks you to stay home and take care of your little brother. She feels very sick, and your dad will not be home until late. You had made plans to go out with a friend, something you have been looking forward to doing. What do you do?
C. You are blamed for stealing money from someone at school. You know and can prove who really stole the money. You also know that the person’s family is very poor. Do you tell the principal who really stole the money? Would it matter if this person was your friend?
Ask students to break into small discussion groups to explain their answers and how they arrived at them and what they think the consequences would be.
When the groups are finished with the discussion, ask students to do the Reflection Exercise: “Your Dilemma.”
Reflection exercise: “Your dilemma”
Think of a dilemma that you have had to face in your own life. How did you deal with it? Did it turn out successfully or in failure? Knowing the four decision-making steps above, would you handle the situation differently if it presented itself again?
- challenges
- character
- character education
- commitment
- compassion
- conflict resolution
- contentment
- cooperation
- courage
- decision-making
- encouragement
- filial piety
- goals
- gratitude
- healthy families
- healthy lifestyle
- integrity
- kindness
- leadership
- life goals
- loyalty
- marriage
- meaningful life
- moral education
- perseverance
- politeness
- relationship skills
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- respect
- responsibility
- self-awareness
- self-improvement
- service
- sexuality
- social awareness
- sportsmanship
- teamwork
- tolerance
- trustworthiness
ReadingsTable of Contents
Instructions: Do not read these stories straight through! You will be asked to make choices as you read, and your selections will determine the outcome. After you make your choice, follow the directions and see what happens next!
The lucky lottery
You and your friend are walking together when you come upon a store selling lottery tickets. They cost $2 each, and the grand prize is one million dollars! You have $3, so you decide to buy one. Your friend also wants to buy a ticket but has only $1.What do you do?
If you buy your ticket and keep your other dollar so that you will have some money left, go to (4).
If you tell your friend you will give him your extra dollar so that he can purchase a ticket also, go to (2).
The freedom fighter
You are the graduate of a good university. You have a doctorate in religion. You have a beautiful, supportive, and intelligent wife. There is a lot of injustice in your society, especially toward people of color, such as you and your wife are. However, with your education and in the right setting, preferably the North, you can probably make a comfortable life for your family on the upper levels of African American society.You are asked to pastor a church in the South, where there is much more prejudice against black people. You know that you and your wife will experience more racial indignities there, yet you feel called to go there.
What do you do?
If you tell your wife you feel called to go to the Southern church, go to (7).
If you keep quiet about feeling called to go South and worry about what your colleagues will think of you, returning to such a racially backward way of life, go to (1).
If you decide to go to the Southern church and, with your wife's support, challenge the racially prejudiced atmosphere in the South go to (11).
The party
You are a 16-year-old boy. It is summer and your parents and younger sister are going out of town to stay with some friends for a week. You beg your parents to allow you to stay home and watch the apartment. At first they refuse. But after discovering that the two neighbors are also going away and will be unable to care for the family dog and water the plants, your parents agree to let you stay home alone under two conditions. First, you absolutely cannot have anyone over except for your best friend Mike, whom your parents trust. Second, you must be home by ten each evening (and you know your father will call almost every night to make sure you’re all right).You are happy that your parents trust you, and you want to prove to them that you are mature. Your mother keeps her home as clean as a museum. Your parents do not smoke and hate the smell of cigarettes. They rarely drink, although your father keeps a liquor cabinet for the sake of guests.
A day after your family’s departure, Mike tries to talk you into having a "small" party. All your friends know that your parents are away and that you have the whole apartment to yourself. You are a little angry at Mike for telling people after he promised he wouldn’t. He just laughs and says you’ll have a heart attack by the time you’re 25 if you don’t stop taking everything so seriously.
For the first few days you ignore their requests for a party, but people keep calling you about it. You realize that if you don’t invite at least some friends over, they will cut you out of their social group and call you a goody-goody.
What do you do?
If you decide to have the party under the condition that only five people will come, and that there will be no drinking or smoking, go to (8).
If you decide not to have the party at all, go to (15).
Choices and results
(1) You lead a good, black, middle class life, but your heart sometimes tells you that the people in the South really needed your help. You always wonder what might have been had you taken the sacrificial route to be among your people down there. In fact, race relations in America seem to be getting worse and worse, even here in the North where you live. Eventually, racial war breaks out. The End.(2) Later you find that your ticket is a loser, but your friend's ticket wins the million dollars! When you see him again he says to you, "If you have change for $10, I'll pay back the dollar you gave me last week."
What do you do?
If you shout insults at him and walk away angrily, go to (16).
If, in expressing your anger at his ingratitude, you hit him, go to (6).
If you congratulate your friend on his good fortune, sincerely tell him, "The dollar was a gift. Keep it," and give him a friendly pat on the back, go to (10).
(3) As you try to engage blacks in peaceful resistance to white prejudice, your family is threatened.
What do you do?
If you give up, go to (5).
If you continue despite the persecution, go to (12).
(4) Your ticket loses. Your friend is upset by your stinginess in not lending him a dollar so that he could buy a ticket as well. In the months ahead the two of you grow steadily apart. Years later you pass each other on the street without even recognizing each other. The End.
(5) You and your fellow blacks spend a lot of time decrying your situation to one another. You become more and more unhappy. It is painful to watch your wife and beautiful children affected by racism. However, you accept that this is just the way it is in the United States. No one really believes in the Declaration of Independence or that all people should be free and equal. You watch sadly as America declines and the American dream becomes a nightmare. The End.
(6) Your friend falls from the blow and strikes his head on a stone. He dies. You are sent to prison. When you are released from prison, your old friends shun you as a murderer. You wander about from place to place, always feeling marked as a killer. The End.
(7) Your wife says she loves and trusts you and that if you want to pastor the Southern church, she will support you. Go to (14).
(8) Nine o’clock comes and the doorbell rings. You open the door and to your surprise and dismay, ten friends, including a girl from school whom you really like, are at the door. They have alcohol with them.
What do you do?
If you let them in, go to (13).
If you tell them that they cannot come in because there are too many of them and you had already said that no drinking would be allowed, go to (15).
(9) Because of the rejection you experience, you become a recluse. Your marriage and finances deteriorate. You end up living all alone, blaming white people for all your personal problems. The End.
(10) Your friend is moved by your generous gesture. In tears, he tells you, "Half the prize money is yours. Please forgive me for being so stingy." You say that he does not owe you anything but his friendship. Your friend insists on sharing the winnings with you. The two of you go into business together and become wealthy. Your greatest wealth, however, is your undying friendship. As time passes, you continue to share your lives together and live happily and productively. The End.
(11) As you challenge white racism, people laugh at you, arrest you, and put you in jail; the FBI is after you, and people you respect think maybe you have carried things too far.
What do you do?
If you continue to speak out against injustice, go to (12).
If you stop trying to share your message with these ungrateful people, go to (9).
(12) Persecution continues, but you steadily gain support. As you lead people in boycotting and protesting injustice, you are asked to speak to wider and wider audiences. Your face appears on the cover of Time magazine. White people are joining you now. The nation is listening to you. The President of the United States talks to you on the phone and asks your advice. Laws are passed that support black people's rights to vote, to go to good schools, and to use any facility used by whites. People's attitudes are changing. America's conscience awakens. The National Guard is sent to protect you and your followers when you march. Blacks enter politics, entertainment, movies, housing, and jobs because of your work. Whites repent for their unfair treatment of blacks. Black people have new pride, new hope, and new opportunities thanks to you. You win the Nobel Peace Prize and generations afterward thank you for your contributions to humanity. You are Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The End.
(13) At first you run from room to room, picking up empty beer bottles and cigarette butts, nagging your friends to keep the music down. After about an hour you tire of being a watchdog and decide to join the fun. A few of your friends (including that pretty girl) are playing a drinking game in the kitchen. Mike asks you to join in, and you do. After you have six or seven beers and a few cigarettes, you get up the courage up to ask a girl to dance. It turns out she wants to do a lot more than dance. You know you really don't want to go into the bedroom with this girl. You don’t know anything about her but her name. But you’re really drunk by now and your friends keep urging you on. You wake up the next afternoon alone in the apartment. Looking around, you can’t believe it’s your apartment! There are beer cans, bottles, and cigarette butts all over. Fortunately, you find nothing broken and manage to clean everything up before your parents return home, so they never know. All of your friends are happy and think you’re "really cool" to have had such a great party. You think it's all over until, two months later, the girl you were with tells you she is pregnant and you are the father. The End.
(14) The South is unbelievably hard to deal with. There are unfair laws everywhere that restrict black people from eating in restaurants with whites, using the same drinking fountains as whites, sitting in the front of the bus with whites, and using the same pools and facilities as whites. You feel angry about this. Your father was a fighter against white racism, and you have never forgotten the indignities he and you have undergone as black people in a white-dominated society.
What do you do?
If you decide you will fight racism in any way you honorably can, go to (11).
If you decide to commiserate with fellow blacks about the situation but stay tight in your own communities and not challenge the white power structure, go to (5).
(15) Your friend Mike is disgusted with you, and your other friends don't want to talk to you anymore. You feel bad, but you know you did the right thing. You couldn’t betray your parents trust. You didn’t believe that your friends could have a small get-together without drinking and smoking. You’re lonely for a while, but then you start to think about the way your former friends treated you and the way they treat each other. Besides, who knows what could have happened if you had let them have a party in your home? You make better friends. The End.
(16) Your former friend uses his money well and becomes wealthy. You are full of resentment as you hear of his success. Meanwhile, your life is lonely and bitter as you continue to curse your former friend. The End.
Lesson Plan Objectives
Cognitive: Students will understand that choices have consequences. Students will gain tools to make more responsible choices and decisions.Affective: Students will want to make the choices that lead to the best outcomes in the stories and in their lives.
Behavioral: Students will apply four criteria in hypothetical situations to make good choices. Students will describe dilemmas in their own lives in which they had to make a decision. Students will compare their decision in the past with one they would make in the present, using the four criteria.
Class Session 1
Explain to the class that, as the chapter points out in the first paragraph, life is full of choices. The choices we make bring about different consequences or results. The students will be reading short stories in groups and following the different results of the various choices offered.Mention that there are three stories: the lucky lottery, the freedom fighter, and the party. Assign five students to the lucky lottery story, nine students to the freedom fighter story, and four students to the party story. Have them sit in groups according to the story they are doing. They all need to have their student books with them. If there are extra students, allow them to sit with the group that is doing the story that most interests them.
Have the students begin the story together as a group. Whenever a choice comes up, students mark in their books (lightly, in pencil) the choice they would make. Then students who agree on a choice break into a smaller group to follow up on their choices. If they are offered more choices, they break into yet smaller groups to follow up on their choices, which they mark lightly in their student books. (The “freedom fighter” story is the most complex.) When they are finished, have them share with one another the thread of what happened according to their choices, reading aloud to one another their circled choices in order. This is so the groups can see the effect different choices have on the outcome of a person’s life.
Do this again several times until each student has heard each story and learned of all the different possible outcomes for each one.
Ask the students for reactions to this. Hopefully, they will be amused and also find it thought-provoking. Emphasize that life offers many choices and that some choices are life-changing; others less so. Some choices can be taken back and corrected; others cannot. Ask them if they think it is good to make wise choices in life.
Questions for reflection
1. In the story “The party,” besides the choices given, how else could the sixteen-year-old boy have handled the situation?2. In one ending of the story (#13), the girl becomes pregnant. Do you think the boy would have acted differently if he had taken this possibility seriously and considered the effect on the girl’s life?
3. If Mike had thought about his best friend’s situation rather than what he wanted to do, would it have changed his behavior?
4. In which ending did the boy consider the feelings of others? In which did he not?
5. Why is it that we often allow decisions to happen to us rather than taking a more aggressive role in determining our choice?
6. Why do we often find it so difficult to foresee the results of our decisions?
7. What does it mean to say that hindsight is “20-20” (in other words, 100% perfect vision in an eye exam)?
8. What does it mean to “rationalize” your actions?
9. What can we do to better foresee the impact our decisions and actions may have on ourselves and others?
10. In each of the stories, what are the moral and ethical issues involved?
Class Session 2
Remind students of the last class session and the different directions their choices in the stories led to. An interesting poem about choices is “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. Perhaps you could read this poem aloud to the students or write it on the blackboard, possibly before class so it is there for them to read when they come in.
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
This poem likens life’s choices to a path in a wood. Ask the students if their experience with the stories leads them to understand why Frost says, “knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.”
Point out that the poet says he took a long time to look at the paths and choose, trying to see ahead to where they might lead. It is good to weigh up the possible results and consequences of our choices and decisions. The poet’s thoughtfulness—”long I stood”—probably helped him make the best choice. On what basis did Frost seem to make his decision?
Ask students why Frost says he will be telling about this “with a sigh.” Explain that a sigh may mean regret over the choice made (it turned out to be the wrong one), or it may mean simply that we cannot have something—whenever we make a choice, other choices must be sacrificed. This can be as inconsequential as deciding to go the long way around to the shop rather than taking the short way, in order to get more fresh air—or it may be as consequential as deciding whom to marry. When we make a choice, other choices must be sacrificed—choices that may have strong good points we wish we could also have but cannot, if we are going to have the superior good points the other choice offers. That is another reason why it is important to make good choices—so that we have fewer regrets.
Exercise: “Moral decision-making steps”
Applying the following four steps in deciding how you would act in each of the three dilemmas A, B and C:
1. Determine what the dilemma is.
2. Decide what moral and ethical issues are involved (e.g., honesty, respect, responsibility, tolerance).
3. Think about how your actions will affect other people, either directly or indirectly.
4. Make your decision.
A. You are taking the final exam in science class. You notice that your best friend is cheating, but no one else notices. Do you say anything to your teacher?
B. Your mom asks you to stay home and take care of your little brother. She feels very sick, and your dad will not be home until late. You had made plans to go out with a friend, something you have been looking forward to doing. What do you do?
C. You are blamed for stealing money from someone at school. You know and can prove who really stole the money. You also know that the person’s family is very poor. Do you tell the principal who really stole the money? Would it matter if this person was your friend?
Ask students to break into small discussion groups to explain their answers and how they arrived at them and what they think the consequences would be.
When the groups are finished with the discussion, ask students to do the Reflection Exercise: “Your Dilemma.”
Reflection exercise: “Your dilemma”
Think of a dilemma that you have had to face in your own life. How did you deal with it? Did it turn out successfully or in failure? Knowing the four decision-making steps above, would you handle the situation differently if it presented itself again?